Dolan connects the dots, launches Kickframe

It’s a tricky time in the evolution of marketing: digital media is essential, but also harder for marketing teams to master. Enter Kickframe, a new independent digital marketing strategy firm that aims to help. The Toronto-based shop wants to make it easier for marketers to take advantage of digital media and quantify its use, said […]

Sarah Barmak
April 12, 2014

It’s a tricky time in the evolution of marketing: digital media is essential, but also harder for marketing teams to master. Enter Kickframe, a new independent digital marketing strategy firm that aims to help.

The Toronto-based shop wants to make it easier for marketers to take advantage of digital media and quantify its use, said founder Tim Dolan, who announced the launch of the new company Thursday.

“It’s at this interesting point where the opportunities are becoming greater in digital, but in order to execute them, it’s getting more and more complicated,” he told Marketing. More budgets are shifting to digital, he said, but they’re finding it difficult to know if complex, multi-channel campaigns are getting results.

“There are just so many channels that marketers are struggling to connect the dots,” he said. “When you are working with a marketer that could have sites and social and data, you have to ask, ‘How will that all come together in a cohesive way?’”

Dolan points to a 2013 Adobe survey of 1,000 U.S. marketers by ResearchNow that revealed only 48% of digital marketers felt proficient in digital marketing. Further, just 9% of respondents strongly agreed with the statement “I know our digital marketing is working,” and 76% of marketers believed measurement is important versus 29% who say the think they are doing it well.

While those stats should cause worry, no one questions the importance of digital media. Among marketers, 76% said their job has changed more in the past two years than in the previous 50, according to the same Adobe study.

Kickframe hopes to work with companies large and small, in Canada and elsewhere — any that wish to place digital more at the core of their business.

“There is a big need for consultants who are independent and don’t have an interest in digital production,” he explains. He would help evaluate firms’ digital capabilities and performance, and then make improvements in different ways.

“It could be a mix of restructuring, it could be education and processes — things that really make a big difference.”

Before starting his own firm, Dolan was vice-president of digital at Cossette. Prior to that, he was vice-president of strategy at Blast Radius in Europe and North America. He is currently an instructor for the CMA Digital Marketing Certificate course, an IAF Certified Professional Facilitator and an engaged participant in conversations about the digital sphere.

“In 2005, Steve Jobs famously told Stanford graduates that life makes more sense looking backwards, as it is only then when you can connect the dots,” wrote Dolan on his company’s blog. “Starting Kickframe at this point in my career represents a relatively straight line.”